


My blood earns my keep

by actonbell



Series: Avengers, Assembled [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Black Widow - Freeform, Female Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 19:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5139014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actonbell/pseuds/actonbell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-MCU. Probably about a year? after Clint Barton brings the Black Widow in from the cold: Natasha Romanoff's first week as an official SHIELD agent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My blood earns my keep

Later, much later, Clint would sometimes refer to Valentine's Day gleefully as The Day Talia Cleaned Up SHIELD, although not often, and never where Natasha could hear him. Or Maria either, for that matter. But even at the time, they all recognized it as a test -- a test of Natasha, of the new world she'd found herself in, and, especially, of limits. Not solely Natasha's.

It was during "Natasha Romanoff's" first week as an official agent -- not the first _day,_ thank God: early enough she was still being escorted around SHIELD, but by the little group of people whose only thing in common was choosing to be on her unofficial team, rather than official security. They were all the more watchful for being unofficial, especially on Clint's part. They were running the gauntlet of the hallways, on their way to some briefing, or debriefing, or maybe just lunch, Maria could never remember exactly where, afterwards. She and Clint and Coulson were in their little pseudo-protective formation, Clint on Natasha's left, Maria on her right, and Coulson just behind. Fortunately this behaviour amused Natasha enough she allowed them to do it. She knew as well as anyone -- _better_ \-- that the general concern wasn't if someone threatened her, but the threat she posed to them: all of them, Clint and Maria and Coulson and even Fury included, SHIELD as a whole. ("She's like a really pretty bomb," Clint had said cheerfully to Maria one day at breakfast as they'd watched Natasha gaze amusedly at the tableful of agents who had all tracked her journey to the skim milk dispenser, wide-eyed as a flock of chickens who'd just witnessed a weasel being welcomed into the coop.)

("A bomb with a conscience," Maria had retorted, and Clint had just grinned his huge bullshit-eating grin at her.)

Maria realized, after it was over, that they had all been worried about the wrong people. There were some SHIELD employees -- fewer than she had expected -- who had known, or, in the worst case, even loved, someone Natasha had killed as a Red Room agent. Most of them quit, a few of them demanded to meet her, one of them confronted her outside her doorway (Clint had gone _batshit_ for two full hours after that and demanded she be moved at least twice; Natasha had refused). Fury had escorted that one personally from the building and SHIELD employment, and then posted guards by her door in eight-hour shifts. Natasha had amused herself by stealing the first guard's wallet, the next guard's SHIELD ID and the last guard's gun, at which point Fury had not at all metaphorically thrown up his hands and yelled so loudly Clint had involuntarily yanked his hearing aid out. Maria supposed if you grew up being tortured into the stuff of legend that gave other intelligence agencies nightmares, it was inevitable you wouldn't flinch even in the face of Nick Fury's full roar, although Maria was still impressed at how completely Natasha ignored him.

When Fury was hoarse, Natasha had finally looked at him and said, a little sadly, "I could have killed him three different ways in five minutes and all of them would've looked like a heart attack to your best doctors," and even if Fury had still been able to talk, he apparently couldn't think of anything to say in response to that. None of them could. 

"She means she's not locked up with us, we're locked up with her," Clint had said to Maria later, and even after he'd explained the reference, Maria still disagreed. Nothing was locking Natasha up, period; nothing was keeping her inside SHIELD's walls but her own free will. That was what was frightening.

It wasn't the people who knew who Natasha was, what she'd done, what she was still possibly capable of doing, that they had to worry about. It was everyone else, who looked at her and didn't see what she truly was. Which, since Natasha had been schooled in deception long before she'd had a chance to choose a true self at all, was everyone.

And so, while they were making their way through the normal SHIELD early afternoon hallway traffic, lightly congested with some chance of shoulder-bumping, somehow, someway, someone reached through both the crowd _and_ past Clint and Coulson and slapped Natasha's ass, probably on a dare. It was a man's hand, and made a loud crack, and must have stung, even through SHIELD-issue underwear, under armour, and the uniform slacks Natasha was wearing, the smallest Maria could find, which still pooled slightly over her shoes. Maria froze at the sound involuntarily. Natasha somehow moved through her little useless personal detail so fast Maria couldn't even see it; she must have blinked, because one moment Natasha was in front of her and then Natasha was behind all of them, holding the guy's wrist. He was a brand-new cadet from his raw haircut to his blinding shoes, and had at least a foot and probably eighty pounds on her. "Hey, take it easy, you little -- " he gasped, and Natasha changed her grip slightly and did something with her fingers and the side of his arm which made him howl in pain. The slowing traffic around them stopped completely, and started to jam up a couple of yards away.

Natasha was watching the guy with an almost affectionate expression which made Maria's stomach go cold. Thank God Fury had called off the official security, because they all would've been standing in a circle of gun muzzles, and Maria could see two or three guards swiftly making their way through the crowd towards them even so. Coulson was behind Clint, holding one of Clint's arms just above the elbow, very lightly. Clint's jaw was clenched so tight Maria feared his (SHIELD-fixed) teeth might crack. 

Natasha's voice was bright and clear, amused, nearly girlish. "Did you say something?" she asked, her tone almost musical with unreleased laughter, and waited.

"Did you say something to me?"

"Nnn...." the guy got out, just barely. Maria gently put her hand on Clint's other arm, too. Clint's jaw eased up, but he kept staring at the guy like an attack dog straining at the leash. Maria saw Coulson catch the eye of one guard quickly and quietly making his way through the crowd, and shake his head just once. The guard hesitated, then kept moving, but much more slowly.

"Oh, I think you _want_ to say something to me," Natasha said, her words very distinct in the packed hallway, because everyone else seemed to be holding their breath along with Maria. "Yes....yes, I think you want to _apologize."_

Maria didn't want to think what she was doing to the nerves in the guy's arm; involuntary tears were streaming from his eyes, and he was turning white. "Please," he said, his voice hoarse but high-pitched, a weird whispery wail, "please don't....please, my...."

"I think you want to say, 'I'm sorry, Natalia Ivanovna Romanova,'" Natasha said, her voice still distinct but unstressed, just a bit more precise than her usual clipped speech patterns. To Maria her accent sounded very strong as she said her name. The guy burbled something, not English, along after her. 

"'And I promise _never_ to do it again,'" Natasha went on, in the tone of a strict but loving teacher. "'To _anyone.'"_ He was somehow falling over in slow motion, his knees refusing to support his own weight, held up only by Natasha's iron grip on his arm. His breathing was fast and shallow. Maria hoped someone who could actually move, unlike her, was summoning a medic. "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you," Natasha said politely, bending with the guy as he sank with sickening slowness at her feet. "Could you speak up just a little bit?" 

He sobbed, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I won't, I promise I won't."

Natasha opened her hand and he crashed heavily to the floor, obviously trying not to scream and whining horribly instead, completely unable to break his fall. Natasha leaned over him -- he writhed away in such obvious terror it was bizarrely comic -- and said something, much more quietly, in Russian. Maria could tell who understood instantly by how their faces changed. "What'd she say?" she hissed to Clint, then Phil, who had let go of Clint and was bending forward very slightly to look at the man on the floor, his face grave.

Clint shook his head. Maria looked back at Coulson. _Later,_ he mouthed.

(Later, he told her: "She said _The youngest sister in the Red Room lasted longer than you."_ "Jesus Christ," Maria said.)

Natasha suddenly looked up ("It was like the fucking raptors in _Jurassic Park,"_ Maria overheard someone say in awe in the cafeteria at breakfast the next morning) and everyone drew back in one instinctive motion, even Clint and Coulson. The three guards finally made it past everyone just standing there rooted to the floor, took one look at Natasha (she smiled at them), and started helping the fallen cadet instead. His face was now a bad off-white greenish colour, and his arm dangled limply from the shoulder. Maria could still hear him crying, very quietly now, as they sat him up to lift him and hustled him off.

Natasha turned her smile on the people who were still frozen staring at her and said, voice overly clear, "Here endeth the lesson." The rest of the onlookers scattered like a group of pigeons.

She looked at Coulson, then at Clint, then at Maria, very deliberately each in turn, and apparently was all right with what she found in their faces, because she said, "Come on. Don't want to be late," and turned to walk down the rapidly emptying hallway in front of them. Clint caught up first.

*

Maria, at Fury's request, handled the sexual harassment and abuse reports every quarter, and so she wasn't too surprised when Natasha stalked into her office the next day, bearing a huge bouquet of dark, sweet-smelling red roses, not the best by any means but still impressive for what was probably a bunch of cadets who had pooled what they'd managed to save up from their stipends.

"What the hell is this?" Natasha demanded. "A joke?"

Maria resisted the urge to say _No, an offering,_ and said gently, "Let me see." Natasha tossed the bouquet on her desk. 

Maria opened the card: _With the gratitude and respect of D-5_ was printed on the inside, a dozen scrawled signatures underneath. "That's....a floor in the girls' dormitory," she said, unable to keep from smiling. "They wanted to thank you."

"For what?" Natasha said blankly.

"For....yesterday?" Maria said, uncertain.

Natasha tilted her head. "Oh?"

"....Did you get any more?"

" _Three_ outside my door and chocolates in my gym locker," Natasha said, annoyed. Maria put her hand over her mouth, but couldn't stop grinning. "Are you laughing? Were they laughing at me? _Is this a joke?"_

"Talia -- Talia, no." Maria sobered up and reached out across the desk without realizing it. Her fingers stopped just short of Natasha's arm. Natasha looked away. "It's not a joke," Maria said, trying to sound less worried. "They're not laughing at you. They _love_ you." She knew the word was wrong the instant it left her mouth. Natasha moved away.

 _"Love_ me," Natasha said flatly. "They don't _know_ me."

"They know what they saw yesterday," Maria said.

Natasha tilted her head the other way and looked at the flowers, considering.

"Do you have a vase? You could ask for -- you know what, we'll get you a couple of 'em." Maria got up and looked out her doorway, scanning who was around, who Natasha might trust. "Sharon," she called, "you busy? We need to round up something for Agent Romanoff to put her flowers in."

Sharon came over, a huge grin on her face, almost as big as one of Clint's. "My unit sent you the spider orchids," she told Natasha. "We couldn't find black ones, though."

*

At the end of the regular internal briefing a month or so later, after Maria had gathered her papers but before she stood up to leave, Fury said, "Just one more thing, Agent Hill."

"Yes, sir?" Maria said automatically, already halfway to the next appointment in her mind.

"I believe you included the incident reports for on-site sexual harassment and abuse," Fury said neutrally, and Maria snapped all the way back into the room.

"I do every quarter, sir," she said, watching Fury.

"These numbers appear to have dropped dramatically since....just last quarter? Are you sure these are accurate?"

"Reasonably so, sir."

"Any reason why that should happen?" Fury said, not smiling at her, but the same repressed note of laughter in his voice she had heard in Natasha's. Maria thought a moment.

"I believe there was a particularly effective training session on the consequences of actions prohibited by state and federal law and SHIELD code," she said.

Fury nodded. "That's what I heard. This _was_ a....one-time session?"

"I think the session was, ah, _very_ successful," Maria said. "No need to repeat it."

"I thought so." Fury sat back in his chair and just looked at her, like one person just looking at another. "Barton made a helluva call."

"Does he get a toaster, sir?" Maria heard herself saying.

Fury shook his head, actually laughing a little. "On your way, Agent Hill."

"Yes _sir."_ She grinned back at him and went on to her next appointment, and the one after that. And that day at SHIELD went on and ended, and another began, and ended, and more days went by in the rhythm Maria thought they would keep until she was forced out with a pension and a gold watch; until she found out SHIELD was rotten, all the way through and hollow at the core, and she and Natalia Ivanovna Romanova helped blow it to pieces.

**Author's Note:**

> The name: I headcanon her actual name is Natalia Ivanovna Romanova, because [according to fybw.org "Alianova" doesn't make much sense,](http://fybw.org/post/5457623630/the-name-game) Ivanovna is actually comics canon for a whole second (see http://33.media.tumblr.com/29950da9e90b40dccb6d5bd51906ea13/tumblr_inline_n9imqyJXcz1qzqhuh.png) and it's sort of a sentimental link with Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5, one of my favourite characters ever. 
> 
> The germ of this story was when I was babbling away to a dear friend about how I'd bet after Natasha's first days at SHIELD the sexual harassment in the gen pop probably dropped dramatically after a few.... _unfortunate incidents._
> 
> I'm terrible at fic titles, so this one is from a Chelsea Wolfe song, "The Warden," which is very Natasha-esque to me. http://www.chelseawolfe.net/lyrics/#cw-54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiwBe8GX-HU


End file.
